17 November 2014

People will ask me what’s the most exciting wildlife you saw, and I suppose I could say the ibises, or the pelicans, or the field full of kangaroos, and those were all pretty special, but you know, it was the sea.

Soft in the bays and inlets; warlike on the rocky coasts; broad and grand at Bondi. Every wave is new; every iteration unique. I could watch it roll, listen to it roar, taste the salt sprayed into the air for hours.

And gosh, the colour; they really don’t call it the Sapphire Coast for nothing.

Wild, untamed; not like the Pacific on the West Coast, not like the Atlantic. Something else. My favourite wild thing.

"My 12 year old daugh­ter uses a com­pletely unfil­tered Inter­net con­nec­tion. She also has root access to the net­work at home and to the com­puter she uses. Yet she’s never encoun­tered any of the prob­lems Sen­a­tor Con­roy and the likes of Sen­a­tor Field­ing seem to believe are ram­pant — no nas­ties, viruses, stalk­ers or any other unde­sir­able in sev­eral years of using the Inter­net unfil­tered and mostly unsu­per­vised. And you know why? _Good rules and decent par­ent­ing_ (well, cer­tainly the first and hope­fully the second)." Man, Australia's conservatism is getting rather scary.

"Anecdotal feedback also confirmed that without exception, the PSP was regarded as the best sales presenter ever received. As a result, Foster’s is now reviewing further rollout of the tool." Fosters use a pre-loaded PSP as sales demonstration tool; it does very well.

"Each world has a specific mechanic and overlapping rarely occurs between world mechanics. Instead, the player is given just enough objects on the screen to solve the puzzle with the limited tools available. By being able to concentrate on one mindset of solving the puzzle, eventually the solutions make themselves apparent." A nice Manveer Heir piece on why the puzzles themselves in Braid are good: because the game creates complexity out of limited tools, rather than throwing every mechanic in all the time.